How do I get to Spetses?

Spetses has no airport. Access is by ferry from Athens-Piraeus Port (approximately two and a half hours by high-speed catamaran) or by road to Costa on the Peloponnese mainland followed by a ten-minute boat crossing. The Athens-Piraeus route is the most common.

How do you get around Spetses?

The island is largely car-free — cars are restricted to residents and essential services only. Visitors move by foot, horse-drawn carriage, scooter, bicycle, or the water taxi network that connects Dapia to the beach circuit.

What's the best beach on Spetses?

Agioi Anargyroi delivers the calmest swimming and the longest stretch of sand on the southwest coast. Zogeria carries the most photographed pine-and-sea configuration. Vrellos sits north of Dapia with shallow swimming suited for families. All are accessible by water taxi from Dapia.

Boutique Hotels in Spetses, Greece

Dapia

The cobbled Dapia waterfront sits at the cosmopolitan heart of the island — the historic port where Spetses' early-twentieth-century jet-set arrived by ferry, lined with cafés, restaurants, the antique cannons that mark the site of the 1822 naval victory against the Ottomans, and the small harbour where caïques and yachts now anchor through the season. Poseidonion Grand Hotel anchors the waterfront — a fifty-two-room Belle Époque landmark architecturally modelled on the Carlton Cannes and the Negresco Nice, opened by Sotirios Anargyros in 1914 as Greece's first hotel to offer spa treatments (four small pools of warm sulphurous water in the original Anargyros design), fully restored across a five-year programme that reopened the hotel in 2009. The accommodation distributes across two wings — the Historic Wing in the original 1914 building, and the contemporary New Wing — with dining at On the Verandah (signature seafront Greek), the Library Brasserie (brunch), and Bostani (farm-to-table from the property's organic hillside farm).

When to visit

April through October is the operating season for most of the island. May and September deliver the most consistent shoulder windows — Spetsathlon (the island's triathlon) in May, Spetses Classic Yacht Regatta in September. Greek Orthodox Easter (late April or early May) brings the candlelit Resurrection mass at the cathedral and the island's traditional Saturday Cherub procession. The Classic Car Race in April and the Spetses Mini Marathon in October bookend the season. July and August carry the highest density of weekend Athenian visitors and the peak heat.